I little thought on stress for today:
From The Chief Happiness Officer.
Read more about the Top 5 myths about workplace stress.
Category: Innovation
Time to Think – Not just a New Year thing
I’ve been involved in a number of meetings recently which were people taking time to consider plans for the coming year. It’s a natural thing to do at the start of the year – but why only at the start of the year?
If we are going to make smart decisions and do intelligent things we need to take the time to work out what they are.
Stop looking for the Silver Bullet – it doesn't exist
I don’t think that a week goes by without someone somewhere suggesting that their latest piece of technology is a silver bullet for a problem that someone is facing.
People then leap on the back of that technology, or concept, or idea and proclaim it as the new holy grail.
I’ve been in IT a long time and have never seen one of these technology predictions come to pass in its all things to all men guise.
Don’t get me wrong, many of these technologies/concepts/ideas have made a significant difference to the way that we work, but they’ve never turned out to be the panacea that some professed them to be.
Experience says that IT silver bullets are as common as flying reindeer, or vegetarian great white sharks.
What puzzles me is that people are still looking for and still taken in by the rally cry of another IT silver bullet.
What is it that makes us participate in such madness?
If the car industry tried to tell us that they had invented a vehicle that required no fuel we’d never believe them.
If the food industry tried to tell us that they had invented a meal that would lead to eternal life for everyone we’d treat them with scorn.
If the Emperor tried to convince us that his new clothes were so wonderful and fine we would surely shout out?
What makes the IT industry different?
Are we spending so much time listening to our own hype that we think it’s the reality?
Do we really want a silver bullet anyway? Sometimes it’s the journey that’s as important as the destination.
Why can’t we recognise the Emperor’s new clothes?
Or perhaps it isn’t just IT?
The Power of WordPress Infographic
I am a big fan of WordPress and a big fan of Infographics, so what could be better than an Infographic about WordPress:
From Techking
Rich Pictures – Showing The Peoples Perspective
I’m really enjoying the way that Rich Pictures have entered into the consciousness of the place where I work.
Actually, it’s gone even further than that, I was recently at a customer presentation, with a customer I didn’t know, and they displayed a Rich Picture in the format I’ve been using.
The use for these pictures that I see repeatedly is to display a people perspective for a problem and/or a solution.
The use of people icons and speech bubbles abound – “I need a….”, “Why is this…”
This is a huge result, not because it’s people using Rich Pictures, but because it’s people taking the time to consider the perspective of the people in the middle of the problem, or the solution.
Monopoly: Social Media Edition
Loving the thought of a Social media Edition of Monopoly, particularly like the idea that Jail has become The Real World.
Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application
Not sure about Blogger being higher up than WordPress? Surely not.
How different would this have looked 5 years ago?
How different will it look in 5 years time?
Scan Reading – Summary Reading
I have a confession to make, I rarely read all of a document.
There, I’ve said it, it’s out in the open.
Why should I? It’s rare that the whole of a document, or to that matter, an email or a blog, has been written wholly with me in mind.
It’s been written to communicate something, so I need to be able to read enough of the document to understand what is being communicated, to the level that I need to understand it.
It’s not a productive use of my time to read all of a document when I’ve understood what needs to be understood by only reading part of it.
I’m sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but it is the reality of the world in which I live.
It’s a skill that has been born out of necessity. In the technical industry people don’t generally rank too highly on the spectrum of brevity. It’s much more likely that people will say too much than not enough.
One of the first lesson I learnt in summary reading was that you can’t get a summary of a document from the section title Introduction and certainly not from the section titled Executive Summary. I always thought it was a rather cruel trick to expect people who have not been executives to know what an executive might want to know about in a summary – assuming, of course, that a Technical Executive wants to read the same summary as a Project Executive or Finance Executive.
The need to understand a document at the summary level is one reason why I still print out quite a lot of documents. There have been all sorts of advances in screen technology and displays, but I still haven’t found one that allows me to flick through a document, forwards and backwards,
I wrote a bit more about this in an earlier post on scan reading.
Knowing that most of you haven’t even got this far I’ll finish there.
I love what I do – because – I’m good at what I do – because…
Feeding the Fire of Expectation
Every time you respond to an email, a text message, an instant message outside of your normal working day you are feeding the fire of expectation.
Don’t be surprised when that fire of expectation turns the exceptional into the norm.
Scan Reading – Pre Classify
If there was one skill I would teach people it would be the ability to scan read, but there is an important skill prior to that – pre-classification.
The people who will succeed in the knowledge age will be those people who can assimilate huge amounts of information, being able to understand what is important and what is not.
It isn’t possible even today to read all of the information that is made available to us, and we shouldn’t even be trying. I know of many people who, myself included, can’t even properly read all of the email that they are sent each day, and I for one don’t even bother trying.
But I do scan read every one of the hundreds of emails, the hundreds of blogs, twitter and facebook.
I don’t find these numbers overwhelming, or a burden. I have a routine, and a system that shows me what is important and allows me to fly through what is not important.
A significant part of that system is the pre-classification system.
Pre-classification is all about efficient use of your minds ability to process things. The minds is much more efficient at repeatedly processing similar things. It’s not so efficient at switching the processing between different types of information. If we had to work our way through a set of activities we would naturally split them down into groups of things and then tackle a group at a time – that’s what the pre-classification system does with information. There’s no way that we would switch between ironing and washing the pots – iron a shirt, wash a pot, iron some trousers, wash a port – and yet that’s exactly what we expect our brain to do with information.
Every email client I know has a rules engine of some description that allows you to pre-classify emails based on where they have come from or on their content. But I see so few people using them. This engine might just be your life saver.
In my scan-reading system all of the emails from expenses, from travel, from corporate communications, from marketers and newsletters get classified before I’ve even seen them. I’ll still scan read them, but that’s all they are going to get. Doing this allows me to handle them in bulk. There’s only one piece of information I care about in the emails from the expenses systems – and, as it happen, it’s the last line that says “status”. As long as this doesn’t say “rejected” I’m fine. Having a set of similar emails to review allows me to apply the same routine to each one, which is much more efficient than switching between email types.
The classification system works in my blog reader to (which happens to be FeedDemon). I fly through the updates of pictures that come through from flick because I’m really looking to see if there is anything particularly interesting. I know which these blogs are because they are in a folder called unsurprisingly “pictures”. The “colleagues” category, though, get much more attention, I want to give the people I work with more time than a high level scan.
Same with twitter and facebook pre-classify and then scan read.
For twitter, TweetDeck is invaluable for this, I care that the column from colleagues has been updated, I will rapidly skim through “all friends” list. They don’t necessarily say anything any more profound, it’s just that I care more about what they have to say than I do about Dave Gorman or Jason Manford, or even MC Hammer.
I’m slightly stretching the point on facebook though, because I don’t get many status updates as I’ve turned most of them off. This then means that I can scan through what’s there without having to work out whether I care or not.
Go on try it out – remember, this skill could be essential to your future job prospects.
I’ll talk about the actual process of scan reading another time.
The Conversation Prism V3
An update to the Conversation Prism Infograph.
The prism shows 28 different categories of technologies that support the current complex set of conversations that we all have, everything from Wiki to Streams and Social Commerce to sCRM.
As someone who works within the corporate IT world there are a number of very prominent organisations we barely feature , or don’t feature at all: Microsoft, Oracle, HP, SAP. The high levels of choice also shows that we are a long way from many of these capabilities becoming universal, and for some even mainstream.
I’m also sure that we’ll see some of these capabilities collapse into other capabilities. There’s also a massive difference between wide adoption and deep adoption. Anyone who assumes that just because they are using Facebook for 2 hours a day means that everyone else is – is mistaken.
Top 10 – Lazy Blogging Tips
Here are some tips for the lazy blogger – but remember “lazy” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”.
The aim of the lazy blogger is to get as many updates on their blog as possible – with the minimal amount of effort. Here are some great ways of getting the most output for the minimal amount of input:
- Write about the same subject over and over again. There’s no need to find something new to say, you can just regurgitate the same old stuff under a different title.
- Get systems to post stuff you are doing in other places. Delicious, Twitter, even Facebook can be made to post the updates you make there into your blog. It’s really annoying for the reader because the value is very low indeed, but at least it keeps your blog updating.
- Top and tale someone else’s content. Find a post you like, copy most of the content out of it into your blog, make a comment at the beginning and the end, done.
- Embed. As with above, just embed someone else’s picture, video, etc. in order to create a post of your own. You can do this without even topping and tailing.
- Just write infrequently.It’s a balance between laziness and neglect.
- Split your posts into multiple posts. If you do get an idea of something to write about, don’t put it all into one post so that it’s easy to read. Instead split the updates across a number of days by writing multiple posts.
- Write trivia. There’s always something useless that can be said, but probably shouldn’t be said.
- The “popular posts” blog. Just cut and paste a list of the most read posts from your WordPress statistics and post it. This list is highly unlikely to change very often partly because you’ve increased the popularity of the popular posts by posting them as popular posts.
- Write Top 10 lists. They are very poplar, they’re easy to write, and often only contain a couple of really valuable insights. I’ve never really understood the phenomenon myself.
- Why does there need to be 10?
Graham Chastney 